Landscape Evolution

 Back when we just thinking about buying this house, I walked around the perimeter snapping photos which turned out to be fortunate as I often look back at them. This shows the backside of our garage and the nook outside of our dining room. It has been a problem spot for us to deal with.

On of our first projects was to reside the house (covering up the unused side door) and then we planted a bunch of raspberry bushes on the backside of the garage. The first mistake was just that they didn't get enough sun on that side of the house and animal depredation took care of what remained in short order. Weeds soon grew back up in that spot.

Although I can't seem to find a picture of it, soon after the above picture, I installed landscape edging and some weed control fabric along with more mulch. The edging helped keep the mulch up on the slope a lot better. I also replaced the rotten logs holding up the earth at the end of the concrete wing sticking our from our house with a small rock retaining wall.  All this helped to hold things in place better which made for a great home for ground squirrels. 

For some reason, ground squirrels called this area home for a long time. They always dug holes in the corner up next to the foundation of our basement which essentially funnels any rainwater up against the basement wall. It fortunately kept all that water out and still has but I would rather not have the water up next to the foundation to start with and so have eradicated the ground squirrel colony multiple times. Once eradicated, I will fill all the holes in and life will be good for a time but for some reason, they always seem to come back. I'm not sure if they can smell the previous tenants or it is just that prime of a location but they loved crawling under the mulch, chewing a hole in the landscape fabric and burrowing a new hole, all in the space of just an hour or two when my eyes were turned.

Some of you may remember this picture from earlier this year. While paying for delivery of a load of building lumber and supplies, I thought I might as well maximize that payment by ordering a bunch of landscaping wall pavers. It turned out to be about a third of what we would actually end up needing but it was the best guess I had at the time.

Due to the slope and poor soil (mostly clay), we decided to build a retaining wall there and backfill it with good soil. It will make house maintenance much easier having a flat terrace to work from, the soil will hopefully allow some things to grow, even on the shady side of our house and perhaps the terrace will discourage deer from thinking it is a smorgasbord. I wasn't particularly keen in having this project going at the same time as the greenhouse project with fall being short enough as it is, but my wife said she would do the bulk of the work. She indeed would build the retaining wall though I would end up moving much of the fill materials. 

We ended up using some 250 concrete retaining wall pavers, 6 tons of black dirt, topped with another layer of landscape fabric and topped with 4 tons of gravel. There is a slight kink in the wall much to my wife's dismay but to her credit, it was almost impossible to make a straight wall that slopes back and ascends a complex curve. Due to the location, every thing was brought in by hand and by wheelbarrow and took a fair amount of time in evenings and on weekends. 

As opportunity presented itself, the current occupant of the ground squirrel home decided to call the inside of our garage home and he/she and I had a long battle one day that resulted in me possibly inflicting harm by stomping on a pile of toys it was hiding under. Later I saw it again out in the open and not wanting to run from me so I put the thing out of it's misery. Now with all that soil, landscape fabric and rocks covering it's home by over two feet, I'm hoping that is the last I will have to worry about ground squirrels in that area of our property.

For now, it is undecided what will be planted there. It will need to be low light thriving things that deer and rabbits don't like so hostas, the crack of the deer world, are definitely out. Below it are the remains of our rose garden which is now covered with recycled old landscaping rock that we found as we were putting in the base layers of the retaining wall. They need some heavy pruning but will probably remain for the time being. 

With this project done, our house is now about 75% landscaped around it. The remaining 25% is out of view on the left of this picture and underneath our raised deck. There is a decrepit concrete patio that is doing more damage to the house than good and is currently home to my woodpile that I use to feed our fireplace in the winter. There are also a couple of raised bed garden boxes which have done poorly over the years thanks to the low light conditions much of the year. Perhaps next year we can tackle that area and plant the above area. There is always something to do.